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Métamorphoses, FP121

Introduction

The printed source of two of these poems (songs ii and iii) is Louise de Vilmorin’s collection Le sable du sablier, where their titles are Portrait and Métamorphoses. The latter title makes sense for this particular poem because it is the violin that is made to take on so many different imaginary shapes. Bernac’s copy of this collection is inscribed by the poet as follows: ‘À Pierre Bernac / Notre amitié est plus forte / que les mouettes et les / sables. Louise de Vilmorin, Noël 1945, Paris.’ The date of this suggests that Bernac must have received the handwritten texts of these poems (including the unprinted first poem, Reine des mouettes) at a much earlier date. A great admirer of Vilmorin, he had personally ensured that he could lay hands on poems by her that were suitable for a male singer, and then delivered them to Poulenc. The HMV recording the duo made of these three songs on a single side of a 12” 78 record was one of their most successful.

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This seems to be the most musically feminine of these three songs, although the poem is addressed to a beautiful young woman. Poulenc has evoked the sounds of the sea and the veiled sonorities of musical mists. It is an enchanting confection that only he could have composed, and it is over in a graceful trice, elegant and transparently gallant. In the best performances the accompaniment seems conjured under the pianist’s hands, sheer musical legerdemain.

At the same time as Tel jour telle nuit was being written, Poulenc discovered a writer whose words allowed and encouraged musical settings of charm—with (in his words) ‘a kind of sensitive audacity, of wantonness, of avidity which extended into song that which I had expressed, when very young, in Les Biches with Marie Laurencin’. Not surprisingly for a composer who loved to write for the female voice, this discovery was of a woman poet, Louise de Vilmorin (1902–1969). The poetess’s family was celebrated for the plants, seeds and flowers produced on their estate of Verrières-le-Buisson. Poulenc wrote: ‘Few people move me as much as Louise de Vilmorin: because she is beautiful, because she is lame, because she writes innately immaculate French, because her name evokes flowers and vegetables, because she loves her brothers like a lover and her lovers like a sister. Her beautiful face recalls the seventeenth century, as does the sound of her name.’

The three short songs that make up Vilmorin’s Métamorphoses are quintessential Poulenc, and indeed make up a sampler and mini-compendium of his three basic song styles: fast and capriciously lyrical (Reine des mouettes), slow (never very slow) and touchingly lyrical (C’est ainsi que tu es) and fast in the café-concert tradition, where moto perpetuo virtuosity is the thing (Paganini). That these enchanting feather-light songs stand chronologically close to Tel jour telle nuit shows the discerning versatility of Poulenc’s song-writing in the late 1930s.

Your body imbued with soul,
your tangled hair,
your foot pursuing time,
your shadow which stretches
and whispers close to my temples.
There, that is your portrait,
it is thus that you are,
and I want to write it to you
so that when night comes,
you may believe and say,
that I knew you well.

Here is almost the quintessential Poulenc song, and much loved throughout the world. The opening prelude, simultaneously passionate and laid back, Chopinesque in its languid rubato (dangerously easy to exaggerate), is the very model of a pianist improvising nostalgically in the half-light. The vocal line, conceived to accommodate both the depths and mezza-voce heights of Bernac’s voice, is equally seductive, if only in looking back with appreciation at a passion that is now in the past. If this is a lover saying ‘farewell and thank you’ for ardour that has once burned bright, the marking ‘very much at ease’ indicates that passion that has died has not been wasted: to have been close to this person has been a cause for gratitude rather than bitterness. The wisdom garnered by the singer from his former lover seems encapsulated in the phrase ‘Que je t’ai bien connue’. The beautiful postlude contains the rise and fall of an inner sigh: former happiness now experienced in soft and distant focus, ‘tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse’—acceptance of mortality. The secret of a successful performance of this song is sincerity, to be sung, says Poulenc in JdmM, ‘without affectation’.

Your body imbued with soul,
your tangled hair,
your foot pursuing time,
your shadow which stretches
and whispers close to my temples.
There, that is your portrait,
it is thus that you are,
and I want to write it to you
so that when night comes,
you may believe and say,
that I knew you well.

Your body imbued with soul,
your tangled hair,
your foot pursuing time,
your shadow which stretches
and whispers close to my temples.
There, that is your portrait,
it is thus that you are,
and I want to write it to you
so that when night comes,
you may believe and say,
that I knew you well.

The madcap scherzo that is Paganini is a sheer piece of trompe l’oreille wizardry. Poulenc had long worked at songs of this kind where the words have to come almost automatically out of singers’ mouths before they have time to think of what they are. This is one of the finest examples of the genre, distantly derived from the music hall. The violin changes from one shape to the other (in modern phraseology it ‘morphs’) before our very ears, and the music is somehow the equivalent of modern film techniques where such changes are engineered, as if by magic, with computer technology. Poulenc dispatches this little firework with the greatest elegance and it makes a perfect ending to a miniature cycle that has had at its heart a serious song like C’est ainsi que tu es.